It’s a pleasing narrative, but it’s also a dull and incomplete one that betrays a hindering obsequiousness in director Thom Zimny. Any rough edges that threaten to make Stallone into a more complicated – and, ultimately, compelling – figure have been dutifully sanded to a nub. As the closest he comes to allowing himself to be portrayed in anything less than a flattering light, he divulges that he regrets pouring so much time that could’ve been spent spent with family into his work. That savviness about image management works against the film as Stallone cordons off the aspects of his persona that he finds uncomfortable or disagreeable. Sly condenses that spirit of brazen self-promotion while cloaking it with faux circumspection, pitching a sanitized, often convincing commercial for Stallone as product in place of the man himself.

Source: Punch October 31, 2023 08:40 UTC